All songs written by Rob Anderson
and arranged by Day Laborers & Petty Intellectuals
except “Second Chances” by Tim Thomas
arranged by Day Laborers & Petty Intellectuals
Recorded at Earwig Studios and at home
between August 2015 and February 2016
Mixed by Don Farwell at Earwig Studios
Mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering
Photography by Tim Thomas and Daimon Eklund

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Day Laborers and Petty IntellectualsSeattle, Washington

Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals is a six-piece folk-apocalypse band from Seattle, WA, featuring cello, violin,
theremin, bucket drumming, and four-part harmonies, not to mention heartfelt songs about love, life, and the end of the world. DL&PI has been bringing their cacophonous blend of indie rock, folk, punk, country, and jazz to the barrooms and bedrooms of the Puget Sound since 2012....more

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I used to be a midweight boxer ‘til I got knocked the fuck out
Used to be a British rock star and all the girls would scream and shout
Used to wonder where you are, used to worry, used to doubt

Used to be a beauty queen and I would wear the freshest style
Used to play the tambourine just to try to make you smile
Used to make the hippest scenes, just to make my life worthwhile

I used to be a famous painter and I would only paint in blue
If I was a great explainer you would see why this was true
Had I been a better man would I still be there in bed with you?

I used to be a rich man, dined on ptarmigan and grouse
Used to be a poor man, I would break into a rich man’s house

Used to be an architect and I designed a monument
To my own intellect, the critics called it insignificant

Used to think that I was glamorous, amorous, intelligent
Although in retrospect I was well beyond my element
I used to be the man you loved but now that’s all irrelevant

And it’s been 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days since you’ve been gone
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days something went wrong
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days did you know all along?

I used to be a famous painter and I would only paint in blue
Used to be a great explainer and you might see why this was true
And if I was a better man would I still be there in bed with you?

Track Name: Dark Mountain

We haven’t got a lot in common
(at least that’s what our mothers seem to think)
Except a shared love of power tools and shamanistic rituals
And putting something extra in our drink

And we will not be made so silent
even though we’re not sure what we have to say
Committed to the principle of opposition through non-violence
At least until someone gets in our way

So we put the pen upon the paper.
We are searing certain secrets in our souls.
And all that transcendental poetry, it doesn’t do that much for me
But some people say the same of rock and roll.

We don’t know very much for certain
(except for certain songs we know by heart)
Anyway, who is that man behind the curtain?
He used to take a lot of drugs, now he just makes a lot of art

You were standing by the doorway
I had my head inside the kitchen sink
And I heard you telling the policeman
“It’s okay, it’s just that somebody has had too much to drink”

I read all about it in the papers:
the replacement of humanity foretold
By collections of transistors and capacitators
And never will we die, we will just keep on growing old.

And from the head of a pin there sprang forth the whole of creation
Oh, look what can happen if you use your imagination

So we went down to the coronation
(without our picket signs and shaking fists)
Stood in the back of the congregation
Amongst the cripples and the atheists

Gritting our teeth in concentration
and confessing everything we once denied
And in each heavy exhalation
Equal parts regret and carbon dioxide

And from the tips of his fingers there sprang forth the whole of creation
Oh, look what can happen if you use your imagination

Track Name: Pilot's Daughter #2

Sweet Marie and Marianne
Come round here one time again
Hoping you will find out something new
I’ll be in the bar behind the Super 8
Got a few things I wanna celebrate
Not the least of which is memories of you

And we are the things that we desire
A small gathering of wires
For lack of a better signifier
Can I call this feeling love?
Everybody knows that I’m a liar
So you better call the fire department
This one was set from up above

Now I’m up on stage with my guitar
Got no idea where you are
A whole lifetime in a name dropped
In a lonesome country tune
And if you hear it then you’ll know
Just like the last buffalo
I hope someone remembers you
For what you never were

You were never taken unawares
Never carried up the stairs
Never did I go across the threshold of your room
But I heard the pilot’s daughter
Had control the day they crashed into Ohio
She was steering for the moon

Track Name: On the Radio

Well I met you at a show
It was a punk rock band from Ohio
And you gave me a ride home in your dad’s Mercedes
Oh I asked if animals have souls
You just reached for the volume controls
Cause your favorite song had just come on the radio

The second time we kissed I thought
Nothing else I do will ever equal this
The sun had just come out and you pointed at the rainbow
I was trying to tell you how I felt
But the words weren’t coming out
So we just smiled and sang along with the radio

(On the radio) Can I take you out tonight
(On the radio) Walk together in the moonlight
and the sun will rise to find us arm in arm and dancing slow
Got no words to tell you how it feels to be with you right now right here
So let’s just turn the song up on the radio

So we were dancing in the street
To an imaginary beat
All the haters on the sidewalk throwing shade yo
And I asked if you believed in destiny
And you just smiled and looked at me
And from a second story window I could hear the radio

(On the radio) I‘ll do anything I can
(On the radio) To be your kind of man
And I’m begging you oh please to be my lady,
I’d like to tell you all the things I want to do with you tonight
But you can’t say that on the radio

(On the radio) Can I take you out tonight
(On the radio) Walk together in the moonlight
and the sun will rise to find us arm in arm and dancing slow
Got no words to tell you how it feels to be with you right now right here
So let’s just turn the song up on the radio

and something here isn’t quite right, think it might be the water
ao lock up your libraries, let loose your daughters.
Sing a song for your great-grandmother, she went there before.
Let us be the ones who will walk through that door.

so let us make of our lives something stranger than fiction.
Let our hearts be fore’er tempest-tossed.
Let us saturate lines with our symptoms, our signs, our addictions.
Let us be the ones on whom nothing is lost.

feminist lithographer / telephone directory / great stenographers / of the 20th century

Track Name: Brontosaurus

We built an ark out of balsa
packed it up with creatures to the brim
two by two with elephants and wooly mammoths
Brontosauruses and hummingbirds, protozoa and bacteria
Sure enough that night we hit an iceberg
Turned out none of them could swim!
‘Bout half the species made it to the lifeboats
the other half, well, pour out yr drink for them
‘Cause nobody know what came before us
Nobody knows all the things that there could be
There never was a brontosaurus
Never was a you and me

We built a philosophic framework
Out of vaguely pre-defined ideals
We wound up all our wind-up businessmen
and watched them go round making deals
And while you and the man on the screen in the corner
engage in intellectual debate
I’ll be over here just making a small fortune
taking bets on the future of the democratic state
‘cause nobody know what came before us
Nobody knows all the things that there could be
There never was a brontosaurus
There never was a human being

We built the case for evolution
We laid the framework from within
We did not call for violent revolution
We only fought the battles that we knew that we could win
And when it comes to fill the lifeboats
Everybody knows you got to take the children first
and then the protozoa and bacteria
and the charismatic megafauna mostly die of thirst
‘cause nobody knows what came before us
Nobody knows all the things that there could be
There never was a brontosaurus
There never was a you and me

Track Name: Rise Up the Dead

Rise up the dead, rise up the dead
Rise up the demons from the depths of your head
Rise up the soldiers with your bellies full of lead
Rise up the dead

Rise up the dead &c.
Rise up the children who were never fully fed
Rise up ye dissidents who died for what you said

Rise up the murderer who’s buried in the shed
Rise up ye suicides and sing with me instead

‘Cause we are storming ‘cross the countryside and tearing down the halls
Speaking to the multitudes and plastering the walls
And when the armies of the living rouse their ranks around my head
They will find me in the valley of the shadow of the dead
Rise up the dead
Rise up the widowers and rise up the unwed
Rise up the prophets and the people you’ve misled

Rise up the jealous lovers murdered in your beds
Rise up to face the living fate from which you fled

Rise up the skeletons come climbing from your graves / Rise up the cannibals and sorcerers and slaves / Rise up the alcoholics, rise up the carnivores / Rise up the senators, rise up the whores / Rise up the constables, rise up the highwaymen / Rise up the soapbox preachers, rise up the born-again / Rise up the working mothers, rise up the secretaries / Rise up the infantryman, rise up the apothecary / Oh rise up Abraham, Oh rise up Cleopatra / Rise up Napoleon, Oh rise up John the Baptist / Oh rise up Lady Macbeth, rise up Socrates / Rise up Emily Dickinson, rise up Mephistopheles

We’re storming ‘cross the countryside &c.

Rise up the dead
Rise up the dead
Rise up and slither in the skin that you have shed
Eyes like the blackest night and lips a bloody red
Rise up the dead

Track Name: Second Chances

The only one I love is the one I cannot be with
no other girls in the neighborhood compare

You see, some time before my heart gave it one last go
knowing it may not end well but I, I forged on

Oh my fears faded away
in her arms, in her arms
then she turned and walked away
when I was exposed to her charm

So after awhile I didn’t know where to turn
so I drank all the whiskey that my bartender would serve

Then it came to me like a whisper in the dark
you treated me poorly girl, I should not be so fraught

Oh this time in your life
just wasn’t right and neither for me
you’re so good at walking away
but I’m so bad at saying goodbye

Wouldn’t you know it only half a year later
this girl came back in my life when I thought I was strong

She said she was sorry, she said she’d been thinking about me
she says she knows much better now and wants to try, try again

Oh my dear you’re too late
I moved on and so have you
I’m so good at walking away
now you’re so bad at saying goodbye
I’m so good at walking away
you’re so bad at saying goodbye

So what’s a man to do
folks, can you give me an answer
how can a simple man
fall in love once again

Track Name: Deadhorse Creek

Got a hammer and a chisel and a couple dozen friends, and we climbed up in the mountains in the middle of the night. We were drunk in the beginning, though we sobered toward the end. By the time the sun came up everybody felt alright. And when I stood back at a distance, my knees went a little weak, to see your likeness on the mountaintop up over Deadhorse Creek.

There’s a crater in the canyon, where the meteorite struck. We lived just up the road a piece in a house made out of clay. When the dust had settled, we found we were in luck ‘cause our enemies were buried, or perhaps they’d run away. So we slaughtered all the cattle, and we drank wine for a week, and we washed off the detritus down in Deadhorse Creek.

And the foxhounds quit their barking once the foxes went to sleep
And their masters struck their matches, lit their pipes and breathed it deep
And at the time nobody knew the havoc we would wreak
When we settled our encampment on the shores of Deadhorse Creek

The county fair rolled in today. I heard them coming down the street with a thousand head of cattle and a grand flying trapeze. And the lion tamer warned me, as he washed the lion’s feet, that the acrobats were misanthropes and the cattle carried fleas. Still, the people flocked from miles around and packed in cheek to cheek. They pumped the water for the waterslides up out of Deadhorse Creek

And my uncle Jeremiah thought he’d make a buck or two, so he built a little house down there with a flashing neon sign. To all the vagabonds and minstrels who came a-passing through, he sold locally farmed berries and dandelion wine. Competition sprang up overnight. You can buy liquor and antiques in that strip mall where the highway passes over Deadhorse Creek.

And the foxhounds &c.

A year ago just yesterday we sat on this very wall, and you asked, “How can love compete with fortune and critical acclaim?” And I loved in the summer, but I loved you less come fall, and by the time spring rolled around again I could not recall your name. So when I read it in the papers, I could not help but weep, and my tears mixed with the water down in Deadhorse Creek.

I was in the crater Monday, when I heard the foxes bay, so I laid down my plowshare and I went and roused the hounds. We chased them up the valley, and across the king’s highway, but we lost them in the hillsides as the sun was going down. So we built a little fire, and we settled down to sleep beneath the moonlight glinting off your forehead and your cheek. And at the time, nobody knew the havoc we would wreak when we settled our encampment on the shores of Deadhorse Creek.